


nothing is for you (nothing was for you)

by hakyeonni



Series: little incubus [17]
Category: VIXX
Genre: 6th Century, Angst, Background Character Death, Gen, Historical, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-19 01:43:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13694259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hakyeonni/pseuds/hakyeonni
Summary: boys aren’t meant to have feathers growing from their back. he knows this. so does she.





	nothing is for you (nothing was for you)

**Author's Note:**

> YEET it's jaehwan's (and taekwoon's) backstory finally

_**Approx. 504 A.D.** _  
_**Baekje** _

“Mama? What’s this?”

His mother looks up from where she’s washing their clothes in the stream, her hair sticking to her face, eyes narrowed. She looks tired, he realises. Maybe it’s just because it’s the middle of the day and it’s boiling hot, but he hesitates, his hands wavering as he holds them out.

“What’s what?” She peers into his cupped hands and huffs. “It’s just a feather. Have you been playing in the woods again?”

He isn’t allowed in the woods, for reasons he cannot understand and is never provided with no matter how many times he asks, but for once he hasn’t broken her rules and shakes his head. “It came out of me.”

For some reason, this makes her pause, and when she turns back to look at him again she doesn’t look tired. She looks _frightened_. The inky black feather, sticky with his blood, folds when he closes his fist around it, taking a shaky step back. “What do you mean?” she asks.

He doesn’t have a chance to run, because she’s fast—faster than she has any right to be, because he has never seen his mother run before. But she scrambles up the bank of the stream and grabs him around the waist, yanking up his shirt as he screams and tries to get away, clawing at her desperately. It _hurts_ , and when she runs her hands over his shoulder blades he sobs, wincing. She pinches at his skin, yanking out another feather, and he feels her inhale sharply as she holds it up in front of her face. She’s trembling, he realises, as he screeches and pushes at her. He’s never seen her be afraid of anything before. Boys aren’t meant to have feathers growing from their back. He knows this. So does she.

“It’s begun, then,” she says, her voice sounding hoarse.

Picking him up and propping him on her hip—despite the fact that, at eleven, he is much too big for that—she carries him back toward the village. Her steps are sure and strong, even as he wails and thrashes. He knows he’s too old for a tantrum like this, but he doesn’t even feel ashamed as he catches the eyes of his friends, peering around the corners of their houses. It feels like something horrible has shifted inside of him, like some power has awakened, and he doesn’t even know who he is anymore.

//

He is never told what he is.

As soon as his mother found his feathers she’d placed him face-down on a bed, gave him a rag to bite on, and knelt on his back until she’d plucked out every feather she could find and his back was a bloody, pock-marked mess. He hadn’t stopped screaming that whole time, his fingers clenched in the sheets, yelling until he was hoarse. She hadn’t given him any reprieve, though; she’d dragged him to the shaman, although by that point he was so out of it he could barely remember a thing. He knows he laid there, at the feet of the shaman, twitching and moaning as feathers continued to sprout from his back—but then it goes hazy, and the next thing he remembers he’s in his own bed, black feathers in the sheets.

He’s brought to the shaman a few more times after that, although he doesn’t remember much of those times, either, because the talks the shaman has with his mother are incredibly boring, and he isn’t allowed to do anything except sit in silence. His back constantly itches, but he cannot scratch it.

//

“Nephilim,” the shaman hisses.

He does not know that word. He’s never heard it before. And yet somehow, when he hears it, it fits, and he closes his eyes. The bite of the needle, the _tap tap_ of it on his chest, stings, but not as much as something else—not as much as the magic that the shaman is stabbing into his skin, over and over. He doesn’t know how it’s magic, only that it is, only that it winds through his blood and chokes him. Part of him is dying, he knows. A part of him he has never met, will never know, is suddenly closed off from him, and he misses what cannot be.

“We bind thee,” the shaman and his mother hum in unison. He clenches his teeth and closes his eyes, ignoring the way his collarbone feels like it’s on fire. “We bind thee to what thou shalt not be. We bind thee to what thou cannot be. We bind thee to what thou is not.”

He doesn’t know what he is. He doesn’t know what he can’t be. So how can they bind him? He’s just a child, but children don’t have feathers and children don’t feel like they can’t breathe because the taste of magic is so heavy in the air, swimming around them, surrounding him. He is nothing.

//

The feathers stop after that.

The ink that was drilled into his skin—shades of grey in the shapes of leaves on his collarbones, hands, ribs, thighs, and feet—tingles when he runs his hands over it, and he finds that when his mother touches the tattoos it hurts so much he yelps. The strange feeling, that magic, is thrumming in them, and he knows that whatever they have done to him is permanent.

“You’re too young to understand,” his mother is muttering as she braids his hair. He looks at her through the mirror and bites his lip. “When you’re older, I’ll explain to you. I promise. But right now… try and keep them covered up.”

That’s easier said than done, considering he gets strange looks from everyone else in the village. After the first week, he takes to covering the only visible tattoos—the ones on his hands—with scraps of fabric wound round his fists, almost like he’s preparing for a fight. It works, and soon people forget. The only people who know his secret are his mother and the shaman, the two people who can’t look at him the same; his mother’s gaze is weighty with some melancholy emotion he cannot identify, and the shaman is… scared of him. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t wake up with feathers in his bed, anymore. He is just a regular eleven year old.

This is how he lies to himself.

 

_**Approx 515 A.D** _  
_**Baekje** _

“Mother,” he begins, “have you seen those strange men?”

His hands are trembling, he realises faintly, as he pushes the needle through the fabric of the shirt that’s laid out on the table in front of him. She looks up at him, her gaze sharp, and not for the first time he notices the faintest of grey hairs at her temples. “What men?”

He has flashes of a conversation years ago—a feather held in his cupped hands, the _tap-tap_ of a needle—but pushes it away, turning his hand so he can’t see the tattoo there. “The men in the woods,” he replies evenly, realising he sounds crazy but knowing he’s not. “Just shadows.” He takes a deep breath in. He knows he isn’t imagining things, but he also knows his mother will not like what he’s about to say. “They make my… my tattoos… they make them feel—”

His mother slams her hands down on the table and he jumps, the needle stabbing into his finger. “Enough,” she warns, and when he looks up at her he can see her gaze is steely and resolute.

“But—”

“I said enough.” She softens, and takes his hand in her own, pulling the needle from his flesh. “I said I’d tell you when you were older. But not yet.”

“I’m twenty two—”

“No.”

He sags and pulls his hand free. The wound has already healed; there’s not even a mark. Things like this do not surprise him anymore. His body has never behaved like it should. “Alright,” he murmurs, because he knows she will not drop it until he does. “Sorry.”

His mother hesitates, the war within her clearly raging on her face. “Knowledge is dangerous, sweetheart. It’s for your own good. Trust me.”

He doesn’t say anything, just nods, training his eyes back onto the shirt. There’s something so quietly therapeutic about this, about making something whole again, that it’s easy for him to turn his mind to the task at hand and avoid thinking about the strange men, because he _knows_ he isn’t imagining them. He almost wishes he was. Insanity would be an easier truth to face than the shadowy figures that follow him from a distance—if they get too close his tattoos tingle so much it nearly hurts, and that’s never happened before. But his mother doesn’t seem too concerned, and he doesn’t want to go to the shaman with his concerns lest he gets ideas about locking him away; he’s heard it discussed before, in hushed tones when they think he isn’t listening.

The entire village seems to think he’s a threat, but he doesn’t even know _what_ he is.

//

They come in the daylight.

He doesn’t know why he thought they’d come at night. Some sense in his gut—the same sense that makes him feel sick with nausea, the same sense that makes his tattoos tingle so violently it hurts—had told him they would arrive, but they didn’t say when, or how. He tried to tell his mother, but she wouldn’t listen, had kept saying that knowledge was dangerous and to just keep being normal.

He’s never really been normal, but he tries.

He’s walking back from the stream, washing in hand and running through a list of what chores he has to do for the day, when he hears it. A queer sound. One that he’s been hearing a lot over the last few weeks. The rustling of feathers, much too big to be a bird. He turns and looks over his shoulder, but there’s no one there, no birds in sight. His tattoos are humming quietly, and his heart starts to race.

He hurries the rest of the way back to the village, keeping his head down, running through the list of chores in his head louder, trying to drown out the sound of feathers behind him. _Knowledge is dangerous._ Is that his mother’s voice, or is it his own? _Knowledge is dangerous. It’s for your own good. Knowledge is dangerous. Knowledge is dangerous._

“Run!”

Her scream shatters the air. He drops the washing on the ground, sees it mingle with the dirt, thinks _what a waste_. When he looks up, she’s kneeling on the ground in front of their house, and there’s a man standing there. No, not a man. He has huge white wings that shimmer and catch the light, and the sword he has held to his mother’s neck hurts his eyes to look at. It _glows_ , and his breath hitches in his chest.

_Knowledge is dangerous._

_Run._

He turns to head back to the stream—flashes of a conversation, forgotten long ago: _if they come, go to the stream_ —but before he can even go two steps he’s seized around the middle, a slender arm stopping him from going any further. He struggles and screams and kicks, gets free, is grabbed by the hair, yelps with the pain and claws at the hands. It’s no use. He is dragged backwards in the dirt by the hair towards his mother, who is moaning brokenly, a horrid sound he has never heard her make before. The pain coalesces into something that sharpens his vision, and he inhales raggedly. His tattoos are burning. He thinks maybe he is about to die.

“Leave him,” his mother is saying as the figure dumps him on the ground in front of her. He looks up at her, and realises she is afraid. “He doesn’t know anything. Look at him. He’s just a boy.”

He picks himself up so he’s on his hands and knees to be able to look at the… creatures. There’s four of them, all with identical white wings and—and eyes that are black as pitch, with no sclera to be seen. One bares its teeth, and his arms nearly give way as he realises that they all have long, pointed canines. Fangs. The image is decidedly predatory, and that’s not helped by the way they’re standing, swords in hand and slightly slouched, like they’re about to pounce. The one closest to him is tall and slender, with a slightly strange, pretty face and pouty lips, its hair hanging in its face. He looks away, resisting the urge to touch his tattoos. The pain is wracking him from the inside out, but there’s not a thing he can do about it. His back itches.

“Mother,” he rasps, but she shakes her head and he falls into silence.

“He’s mortal,” she says, and he blinks. Is there such a thing, to be not mortal? “Look at his tattoos.”

The slender one speaks, and his voice is quiet, lilting. “We see them.”

“So let him go.” Even now, with a sword pointed at her throat, even as she’s shaking, his mother is brave. “He hasn’t done anything. He is innocent.”

The creature holding the sword to her neck hisses, its wings fluttering, and they both recoil on instinct. “Wench,” it growls, and it is meant is a slur. “Be _quiet_ , whore. He is the very image of original sin.”

He starts to tremble. “I don’t—” he begins, his voice giving out when all four of them turn to look at him. “I don’t understand…”

A long silence. He _doesn’t_ understand. He has never understood less in his life, and that includes when he started pulling feathers out of his back, when the shaman _tap-tapped_ magic into his skin and bound him. This is all related, he knows, but the rest is a mystery to him. _Knowledge is dangerous_. The pain clouds his mind, and everything swims. He is hot all over. If the creatures don’t kill him, surely this will; surely he is burning up and will drop dead at their feet.

“He will live and he will die,” she pleads, her voice reedy with desperation. “He has no magic. He is innocent.”

Silence before the slender one speaks again. “The wench speaks the truth.” It screws up its face like it’s disgusted. “He reeks of mortality. He will die young. The bind is doing what it should.”

“He is _base_!” the creature holding the sword to his mother’s throat cries. “Are you mad? You know what he’s capable of.”

“Not like this,” one of the others points out, folding its wings around itself slightly.

Like this, kneeling on the ground in front of them all, he realises that his life is being bargained for, although he still does not know why. Original sin? Base? He’s not normal, he knows, but he isn’t capable of whatever it is they think he can do. Right now all he can do is sway and sweat, the pain slowly splitting him in two from the inside out. When he looks down at his hands, he’s surprised to see the tattoos look just as they usually do—he’d expected them to be on fire, burning him up, consuming him whole.

“Enough!” the creature next to his mother roars. “I did not come here to let a nephilim slip through our fingers, one masquerading as human or not. This pretense ends today.”

The creature draws its sword across his mother’s throat neatly and cleanly. The blood spills on the ground, mixing with the dirt, and he screams as he catches her fall. He presses one hand to her throat, but she is already gone, her eyes milky and staring skyward, seeing no more. The screams tear through him, although he isn’t aware of anything except the crimson, the way her blood looks on his hands, the way his vision swims and narrows as he shakes. She is gone. _Knowledge is dangerous._

With an inhale, Jaehwan closes his eyes, the pain reaching breaking point. He is sure he is going to die, and with an exhale, he does.

The magic in his tattoos—the magic that has laid dormant for so long—shatters. His soul is ripped away from him, his humanity, his pain, his ignorance replaced by _knowing_ —and when he opens his eyes he sees. He sees with new eyes, sees every grain of dirt, sees the fine hairs on the blades of grass in the clearing across the way. He sees his mother’s blood, sees the way it bleeds into the skin of his palms, sees the pattern of his fingerprints stained red. He hears the rustling of feathers behind him, he tastes eternity, and he lets go.

The wings burst free and he nearly faints with the relief of it. The itch is gone, replaced by nothing but righteousness, and when he spreads them and gets to his feet—moving fast, faster than he ever could before—the sword appears in his hand without him even having to think about it. It is heavy and weighty, the blade stained with blood already, and when he drives it through the bottom of the creature’s jaw he doesn’t even flinch. This is the realisation of what he was always meant to be, what he could not be, and he doesn’t even care that his tattoos are burning in a different way, now.

They come, one by one, and one by one he cuts them down. He doesn’t even think. He just acts. He has never in his life fought like this before—has never even held a sword—but it’s easier, easier than he thought it would be. Perhaps this is what they meant, when they said he was dangerous. Perhaps he was made to fight these creatures.

“You have doomed yourself,” the last one hisses. It’s the slender one, the one that was the most rational, but now its face is twisted into hatred.

“Shut up,” Jaehwan counters, flapping his wings and raising into the air to dodge the way he swipes.

Oh. He can _fly_. He wants to laugh, even though he’s spattered with blood—it’s dripping from his feathers, pure viscera and gore—and his tattoos are still stinging. He’s never even considered what it would be like to have wings. He’d never even considered what it would be like to be this.

This creature, though, is not like the others. The others died easily, moved too slowly, too predictably; this one is always a step ahead, quick and fast, and Jaehwan relishes it. He thinks he’s gone insane, and then realises he does not care. When the creature lands a hit on his shoulder, he barely feels it, only notices when he looks down a few minutes later and it’s not healing. Now _that’s_ odd. He’s always healed absurdly fast, even before… today. But the wound does not close, the blood does not stem, and it begins to ache.

“You know nothing,” the creature hisses as a parry brings them close together. “Look at you, fumbling.”

He opens his mouth to reply— _are all your kind so dramatic?_ —when the creature makes a move that he does not anticipate and he sees the sword heading straight for his face. Time slows down entirely. It _stops_. They are frozen like that, Jaehwan with his new wings spread wide and his body heavy with the blood of his new enemies, the creature with its eyes narrowed and his fangs bared. Jaehwan can see the sinews and muscles on its arm, can see the way its hair is standing on end, and as the sword moves towards him he closes his eyes—

And lands on his hands and knees, gasping for air raggedly, crawling away from whatever danger is behind him. He spares a glance over his shoulder, but there’s nothing there.

There’s nothing there.

There’s nothing _anywhere_. This forest is instantly unfamiliar, and when he gets to his feet and draws his wings around himself he realises he has no idea where he is. He’s still bloody and raw, and when he cups his hand over the wound on his arm he realises it’s still bleeding. This wasn’t a fever dream, then. His mind turns to the image of his mother, lying in the dirt with her throat slit, and he closes his eyes.

He and the creature had been—they’d been fighting. Time had seemed to slow, the air had seemed to ripple, and now he’s… here. Wherever here is. And he’s alone, the creature nowhere to be seen.

His legs give way without him even really paying attention to them. One moment he is standing, and the next he is on the ground, buried amongst the leaves like it is his destiny to die here. Now that he’s not fighting, the adrenaline burns away, leaving him with nothing but an emptiness that is so raw it’s like a gulf inside him. One of his wings is draped over himself, and he stares at the feathers, eyes wide but not comprehending. _Knowledge is dangerous._

There in the dirt with nothing left, he finally understands what his mother meant.

**Author's Note:**

> so this is the interlude (for lack of a better word) between parts one and two. next up, we move into part two, and since we're nearly there (and i've started writing it even though i'm meant to be on self-imposed hiatus kjfhgjkf oops) i can reveal that it's set 10 years in the future from the main storyline, so in 2027 :~) no more spoilers!!
> 
> hope you enjoyed this (as much as one can enjoy something so emo), and i hope you're looking forward to incubus's new direction with me. as always comments give me life! thank you so much for reading ♡


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